Samsung will not revive OLED TVs

Despite a fundamentalist belief among the Tame Apple Press that OLED would be the next big thing, Samsung says that it will not be looking at OLED TVs and it is slashing its production of smaller screen OLEDs because Apple was not selling enough iPhone Xs to make it worthwhile.

The firm told reporters during a roundtable in Seoul that it decided against releasing a new range of OLED TVs, so it can dedicate more resources to developing a refreshed range of high-end MicroLED and QLED TVs.

Angered that Samsung is apparently has abandoned Apple's master plan, Reuters spat that was untrue: "Samsung’s market share in the TV market fell from 57 percent in 2015 to a mere 20 percent in 2016, as its OLED TVs failed to compete with LG’s – which saw its share rocket from 17.5 to 43 percent in the same period."

So if you don't sing from the Apple hymn sheet, you must be a terrible business.

What really happened was that OLED had burn-in issues and Samsung introduced its trademark QLED which does not have them. Many reviewers favour QLED. Samsung might kill off OLED in favour of MicroLED. Still Reuters is hopeful that Samsung will make a U-turn in 2021 or 2022.

The source of this rumour is ETNews which said Samsung is developing a new ‘QD-OLED’ TV display technology that allegedly marries the brightness and colour benefits of Quantum Dot technology with the self-emissive lighting, ultra-thin designs, response speed and black level benefits of OLED technology.

The report suggests that this combination of two technologies will enable Samsung to distinguish its backlight-free technology clearly from the OLED TVs now offered by some other TV brands.

The QD-OLED screens apparently use blue OLEDs as their light source instead of the external LED backlights usually associated with Quantum Dot displays. Red and green colour filters with a Quantum Dot are then placed on top of the blue OLED, resulting in an enhanced self-emitting OLED-type screen with Quantum Dots on hand to boost colour reproduction.